Beware the Well Fed Man (The Ebon Chronicles)

by Chris Capps

  “Incredible.”

  There was nothing in the sky. His eyes glazed over and he lost consciousness, slumping back against my hands and breathing shallowly. Soon a shadow was spilling over us, joined by another. Silhouetted by the sun both Crassus and Euclid arrived, looking down on our fallen tribe’s leader. A few others, partially to escape the rancorous howls and laughter erupting within the Plexis had come out to check on Thunfir.

  “Help me,” I said, “Help me get him inside.”

  Together six of us lifted the old man, gripping him beneath his back and letting his arms hang slack beside him. As we moved from the hot sun to the cooler doorway of the Plexis entrance, suddenly the howling congregation of the Thakka Cluster fell very silent, and very still.

  I let my eyes roam the room wildly, noticing the men and women of the Cluster were standing, scattered all around, slowly turning and staring at us. At the center of it all, solemnly the Matriarch drifted a fresh bundle of leaves beneath her nose and inhaled deeply.

  The only sound we could discern aside from Thunfir’s heavy breathing and our own footsteps was the crackling of embers snapping in the Matriarch’s hand. Then another sound, metal slid against metal and clattered to the floor. Crassus made a terrified yelp. I swear I could feel him trembling even three feet behind me.

  The whole room began humming as a hundred voices tuned themselves to one another in cohesion. The sounds mingled, notes twisted, and finally they were filling our ears with a single sustained complex sound. I tried to read their faces. Nothing.

  Whatever reverence they were showing, if any, was secret to us. We passed through the room and found no resistance from our new allies. At the end of the room a small group of men moved aside and let us pass by. We made the journey through the halls until we reached the elevators, and carried Thunfir’s unconscious body all the way to our apartment on floor 19.

  There we cleaned his wounds and watched over him for a long night, awakening only occasionally to soothe his fevered ramblings. It was uncertain if he would live through the night.

  But he did.

  In the timid moments between the dead of night and dawn, Euclid visited us to announce that the Thakka Cluster had discovered one of our weapons caches and had descended on it with maddened avarice. He spoke slowly, solemnly, and seated himself at our dining table,

  “It was insanity. Last night they were howling on the first level, wandering from shop to shop and just taking things - grabbing whole displays of useless items and destroying them. When they learned of the weapons cache in the eastern wing, they disappeared. Gunshots kept me up most of the night as I sat huddled in one of the shops and waited to die.”

  “They haven’t moved to the other floors then?” I asked, noting an implausible wry smile crossing Crassus’ face.

  “They don’t trust the elevators,” Euclid said, himself now sharing Crassus’ contagious grin, “But I don’t suspect that will last very long. At one point in the night the riot detectors mysteriously turned on and the Plexis closed the only connecting hallway between the Eastern Wing and the rest of the building. Elevators were likewise put under lockdown.”

  “That’s a shame,” Crassus said, a look of mock concern crossing his face, “It could take weeks to tunnel through the wall adjacent to those doors.”

  “Isn’t it, though?” Euclid said, “By the time they’re able to get out a lot can happen. Even our old Thunfir might be awake again.”

  Shocked, I looked between Euclid and Crassus, not knowing whose brilliance to praise first. Once again these two miracle workers had found a way to deliver us from catastrophe. Certainly the delivery systems would continue to dump food from the botany levels, but it would buy us time to plot out our next move. With the Thakka Cluster quarantined in the Eastern Wing of the first floor, suddenly we once again had a fighting chance.

  Something about that must have displeased the gods.

  The PA system generally only served to play gentle music or occasionally make vague announcements to visitors. These had been largely ignored, as they were rarely useful. But there was something different about it as a gentle alarm broke our brief but glowing silence.

  The voice that now spoke from the tiny holed plate in the ceiling was somehow familiar, though I couldn’t place where I’d heard it before.

  “Warning,” the echoing voice said. It was a man’s voice - calm, soothing, “Fallout levels on floors 6, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 19 and 20 have exceeded safe levels. Please contact your supervisor for more information.”

  Crassus and Euclid were both staring at me, looking to me to make sense of this sudden change. Still reeling from the sudden shift in the wheel of fortunes, I lowered my head to the table and ran my fingertips across my forehead.

  I should have known then that it was no coincidence. I’m all the more foolish for not realizing how unlikely it was that this would all happen right when it did. The timing was too perfect for any rational individual not to notice. But then statistical analysis wasn’t my job. It was Euclid’s. He stared long at me, contemplating what to say, what our next course of action should be.

  “They’ll be frightened now,” Euclid said, “We all know the meaning of that word. Archaic for the blight, still used in some regions. Fallout means the air and food around us may be slowly turning poisonous. What do we do?”

  “That voice,” I said, taking off my glasses to wipe the dust from my eyelids, “So calm. Where have I heard it before?”

  “There’s no reason to panic just yet,” Crassus said, getting up from the table to walk over to the sink and pour himself a glass of water, “The building’s sensors are calibrated to a time when fallout particles were feared and rarely understood. I’m surprised they weren’t tripped in the past with the amount of dust that blows through the entrance.”

  “Background radiation has now reached 0.005 millisieverts per hour,” the voice chimed in once again, “Please consult your supervisor or a nearby security representative to guide you to the nearest exit. You are in no immediate danger, but prolonged exposure could have adverse health effects. For your own safety, and the safety of others, please...”

  The voice continued, bleeding hope out of us like an open wound. We sat, staring at one another in silent, stoic despair. Crassus’ mouth was hanging open, his head was shaking slowly. Euclid started writing in his notebook.

  “So that’s it,” Crassus said, “I guess we’ll have to leave after all.”

  “The voice said 0.005 millisieverts per hour, correct?” Euclid said, punctuating the sentence by wildly circling one of his notes, “If that’s the case, then it isn’t something out there causing the rise. It must be something inside.”

  The egg. The FNF style radioisotope generator. Why would we need to look into the surrounding countryside for the source of an ionizing radiation leak when the Plexis itself contained something so profoundly radioactive? It was clear to us all what the announcement meant. The FNF reactor must be malfunctioning. It must have breached, leaking dangerous radioactive particles into the ventilation systems.

  Soon enough we would all be standing around a nearby information terminal as Crassus confirmed our fears. The diagram he pulled up showed the egg’s radiation levels climbing, reaching 0.82 mSv inside the reactor chamber. Eyes glued to the console, Crassus communicated with the terminal exclusively through touch now, saying to us,

  “Temperatures are also increasing around the egg. Fires are expected to break out soon. If this leak isn’t contained...” he paused, something seemed caught in his throat, “it will begin melting through the floor. We have to tell everyone to grab what they can and leave. Someone has to tell them they have to go. Everyone.”

  “Not everyone. We’ll stay behind,” Euclid said calmly, “Crassus and I will do what we can to contain the breach through the terminals. From these temperatures, it seems like the situation will gradually get out of control in a matter of days. We’ll find a way to let the Thakka Cluster out after giving our b
rothers and sisters a two day head start. Crassus and I will stay and do what we can. Maybe we’ll find some way to fix the reactor, and everyone can come back home.”

  Everything was deteriorating so fast. We had earned a right to live in the Plexis. We were prepared to fight everyone who came to take it from us. And now the machine itself was turning against us, dooming us to live each day in the shadow of tragedy.

  We had tasted our last meal, enjoyed our last song, slept our last soft night. The tribe of Plexis was now destined to be exiled by the very technology that we had come to depend on. And of course my brother had volunteered to stay behind, to shepherd the Thakka Cluster away days after our friends had disappeared over the horizon. He wouldn’t survive. His purpose would be gone without the Plexis, and my own purpose would be gone without someone worth protecting.

  I elected to stay too. Crassus was pleased.

  That night, as Euclid began organizing the exodus, I stayed behind watching over Thunfir. His fever had broken, but I suspect the delirium was the only thing keeping him from the intense pain he soon woke to. His face was still bloodied, his beard bleached a rare white by the copious amounts of antiseptics we had used to clean his wounds. Long lines cracked down the sides of his face by his eyes. They opened once again, but they weren’t focusing on anything. He blinked heavily, and breathed, whispering to me,

  “Ebon. Still here?”

  “Yes,” I said gripping his cracked and dry hand in mine, “I’m here.”

  “It’s dark,” Thunfir said, “Blurry. Can’t see.”

  “You might have damaged your eyes,” I said, “You took such a beating. It would have killed a lesser man.”

  He tried to produce a chuckle, but only managed to choke out a cough, following it with an arid and painful sigh,

  “Never wanted this.”

  “Even a great man loses a battle if he’s outnumbered a hundred to one,” I said, “I wouldn’t worry about that. You spread around more hurt than they were able to place on you.”

  “Didn’t want to be leader,” he said staring with unseeing eyes into the steel bars of the bunk hanging over him. There was a thin mist in those eyes, “But I remember seeing something. I don’t remember what it was, but I thought I was dying. I think it’s the last thing I’ll ever see well. It ruined my eyes.” He paused, then sighing, said, “Maybe I’ll get glasses. Does that take long?”

  The hair on the back of my neck prickled, and I let go of his hand. Thunfir reached out, grasping the air around him, his voice becoming distant like the wind.

  John Newlywed. It was unmistakable. The voice I had heard making the announcement over the intercom, the one that seemed familiar and yet strangely out of place, it was the same voice that had led me through my eye exam. The soothing and strangely clinical tones were exactly what we would have expected. And why not? The Plexis had every other kind of sensor to ensure it was operating at peak efficiency. Why not a voice to declare when it was dying? Of course something like that would be necessary, even in a world where experts would be constantly monitoring the FNF generator.

  A seed of doubt sprouted in my mind, and I slowly started backing away. Thunfir was leaning up slowly, wincing in pain as he tried to lever himself out of bed. My chair clattered to the ground.

  Could someone take the voice of John Newlywed out of the store and modify it to announce a radiation leak? Could someone fashion a hoax of this magnitude if they knew how the machines within the Plexis operated?

  It couldn’t be a lie. There was no reason, no justification for it.

  “Thunfir,” I said, a pain wholly alien to me suddenly gripping my chest, “Something isn’t right. Something is terribly wrong.”

  - - -

  The construction of the KFM ritual device is an art that rose to prominence in the generations following the first exchange to track the danger of fallout laden weather patterns. The actual mechanism by which it works has been debated by scholars, shamans, and farmers alike. The only things that are still known for certain are how to build them, and that they are the only known way a simple scavenger can reliably measure the blight. The original design was improved on regionally several times over the years as standardized materials became less reliable.

  The etymology of the letters KFM have since been lost in time, but most scholars agree that the final two letters almost certainly stand for Fallout Meter. The first may have, as was often the case at the time, been attributed to the inventor of the device.

  The design is simple. Two square pieces of aluminum foil are attached by candle’s wax, suspended over a hollow cylindrical container with a measuring stick running crossways over it.

  Static electricity is generated through the rubbing of wool or sack cloth and then applied to an insulated wire suspended over the hanging foil pieces. When the wire discharges, it moves the foil pieces outward - away from each other. The further out the two sheets of foil move, the greater the fallout levels in the area.

  And as I sat with trembling fingers, looping wire over wire and suspending the foil inside the container, I silently prayed to the anonymous K in KFM, rubbing two pieces of cloth together vigorously and counting. With a tiny static charge built up in my hand, I touched my finger to the exposed wire suspended over the foil and leveled my head over the makeshift device.

  The tiny crackling spark leapt from my outstretched fingertip onto the wire. No movement from the hanging foil. No radiation. The room was perfectly safe.

  “No,” I whispered through clenched teeth, “That’s wrong. You did it wrong. Crassus is no liar.”

  I seized the pieces of cloth, rubbed them together, built up another static charge, and touched the wire. Once again the foil refused to move. My hands clenched, shook. Tears flowed freely, drawing down my nose and into the device. I hissed, smacking it aside, sending it clattering against the wall. It was impossible.

  Crassus had lied. There was no radiation. No meltdown. The Plexis was perfectly safe.

  The greatest danger, one that had followed the KFM ritual device through its many generations was that it was too simple, based on properties that even the most informed blight shamans couldn’t explain without resorting to superstition. The actual science of it had been lost over the ages. And it looked like any number of birdgut reliant augers. But those who ignored its accuracy did so at their own peril. I stared long at the metal cylinder resting on its side in the corner. For the first time in my life, all faith in the device was lost. It was a toy.

  A useless toy.

  “Ebon,” Thunfir groaned, spacing his words with thick weakening breaths, “What is it?”

  I stumbled out of the apartment we had shared these many months, carried myself down the hallway, and stared out as our own line of men and women disappeared up the hill into the distance. They were loaded down, carrying everything they could into what would soon become night.

  My head was swimming. Before I knew what I was doing, I had burst back into the apartment and grabbed my hunting rifle. I gripped it tightly, strangling it in my hands. The gentle alarm was chiming, and John Newlywed’s voice came through once again,

  “Please make your way to the exit as soon as possible. Radiation levels have reached 1.3 millisieverts per hour. Prolonged exposure could have serious deleterious effects.”

  Rounding the corner I faced another empty hallway. Down six flights of stairs, in the very heart of the building I would find the doorway to the massive spherical chamber that held the egg. If the radiation was as high as the intercom was saying, I would never reach it. I had seen what 1.3 millisieverts per hour would do to a living human. What’s more, if the radiation burned me down I would die happily. If there was any threat from the reactor, it would mean Crassus and Euclid hadn’t conspired to betray us. It would mean the voice wasn’t all a lie. It would mean I had made a mistake while constructing the KFM. We would die as a family together. It was a death I could have lived with.

  I pulled back the bolt on my rifle, biting m
y teeth hard into one another, housing a shell in the chamber. The doors to the generator room slid open. The temperature was cool. There were no alarms. There was nothing but the gentle thrum of machinery. And a voice. Euclid leaned down and spoke into an intercom.

  “Crassus, he’s here. Get up here. Now.”

  The room was large. Much larger than the standard shops in the rest of the Plexis. In the center was a thick polished sphere suspended by massive tubes. All around me, surrounding every control panel were large wooden barrels and metal casks. I recognized them from our battle with the walking city. The serpentine. No one had been there to remove them from this room. There hadn’t been time. Euclid was standing on one of the catwalks surrounding the egg, writing in his notebook. He glanced up casually, and waved,

  “Hello, there. I suppose we shouldn’t dance around the fact that the reactor’s not going to melt down.”

  “It might still,” I said pointing the rifle down at one of the barrels, “But I want to know why you sent everyone away first.”

  He stared down at me, moving to one of the stairways and pursing his lips in contemplation, as if unsure of where to begin. Calmly he held out his hands, letting them wave gently as he lowered himself down to the steel tiled floor,

  “You don’t mean that. Ebon, you’ve got to trust me. Don’t do anything rash, because this is all going to make a whole lot more sense in a few minutes.”

  “Trust isn’t going to come easy to you,” I said, turning the gun back to him and narrowing my eye down the scope, painting the scope’s dots on his chest, “And that’s where you should stop. Right there.”

  “Remember the day I arrived? It feels like a lifetime ago now, but it was only a few months. It was before Thunfir was leader. Before the spider city appeared. Before the Thakka Cluster. I’ll never forget how you welcomed me. You said this place held wonders to finally rival the nightmares you had witnessed out there in the untamed lands. It was something wonderful, worth fighting - and yes - even dying for,” he paused, “But it wasn’t the first time I had seen something wonderful.”