Monsters of the Apocalypse

by Rawlins, Jordan

  "You know my name?" Arian squeaked with excitement.

  Nestor and Jacob both turned and stared at Arian, who, in embarrassment set down his gun and returned his gaze to his computer. Jacob sighed and lit up a cigarette.

  "I need you to do this, Nestor. It'll save a lot of people. Do you believe me? That I’m your friend?”

  “I haven’t killed you yet, have I?”

  “Well, it’s good to see you too, Nestor.”

  Chapter 8

  ***

  October looked down at the corpse that lay in the doorway, shot sloppily in the stomach, but also twice through the eyes - Jacob's calling card.

  “Is my camera on?”

  “No, Mr. President,” the specialist croaked through his injured throat. "They're all off."

  "Is there a security camera? Can we see what Jacob did when he was here other than using amateurs for target practice?"

  "Yes, sir. I'll bring it up."

  "Miho, look at this mess. Look at the guns. Old and outdated. What is that?"

  "Shadow Army protocol, sir. There are sensors in any military or combat-quality gun made in the last twenty years. If more than three show up in a single location in the US our security forces are notified - it was a program created after the Great War, to try to prevent any sort of organized militia attack. To get around this the Shadow Army often uses older or outdated weaponry."

  "Okay, but I don't see any Shadow Army here. I see Americans. I see modern day Alphas and American Security Forces. Are you telling me there wasn't one casualty on Jacob's side?"

  "It would appear so, but I feel it's more likely that Jacob has recruited a new group of soldiers and that's who we're seeing. These new Alphas were probably working for Jacob."

  "What?! Find out how the hell Jacob got a team of American soldiers in his employ without us knowing!"

  Miho silently left the room with a nod to Flores as the computer specialist brought up the recording from the security cameras. Flores moved beside the door silently.

  “Okay, I'm cuing the security footage right now," the specialist said, gently rubbing his neck where the haze of a bruise had begun to form. "They turned on all the cameras... that’s odd.”

  “What?”

  “Either there was a glitch, a technical short or... or else...”

  “Or else what?!” October shouted.

  “Or else they turned the cameras on, then turned them off, then turned them on. Over and over.”

  “What?”

  “Right here, Mr. President, watch."

  October moved over to the screen as the specialist pointed at the small image of Jacob and an almost impossibly dark man, undoubtedly one of the mercenaries from Jacob's Shadow Army, in the identical spot only an hour earlier. He briefly noticed the reflection of Flores in the screen, staring right back at him.

  "Right there, sir, see this screen? You see a glass then it goes black, then the glass comes back, now watch the black guy's hands. He’s making it do that.”

  “Where’s the recording from the feeds? I wanna see the footage from that camera.”

  With a few strokes the nervously sweating computer specialist brought the recording up on the screen. October watched the screen that showed the whiskey glass before it went black and then came back. And then, October saw it and felt that his world had just gotten a little bit sharper - Nestor’s face.

  Nestor Bravo's face.

  “Okay, Jacob. I’ll be there. I might not kill you. I’ll have to think about that,” the recording of Nestor said into the dark.

  Then the screen went black. The computer specialist turned and looked at President Carnegie.

  “I thought… I thought that the camera was undetectable, Mr. Presi…”

  “It is.”

  “It looked like that man knew it was on.”

  “His name is Nestor Bravo. And he did.”

  “There actually was a Nestor Bravo? I thought he was just a legend.”

  “No, he isn't.”

  "So, the "The Night of a Hundred Bullets" really happened?"

  "Yes."

  “Wow. Well, sir, I can turn on his camera right now and we’ll see where he is.”

  “No. Not yet,” October said warmly tussling the smaller man's hair, before standing up to his full height. He squinted into the dark Indian eyes and cheekbones of Agent Flores. "Not yet."

  “Why not?”

  In a blur, eyes still on Flores, October turned, grabbed and threw the small specialist onto the ground and kicked him in the stomach. Finally October moved his eyes from the passive Flores to the small man who was shivering with fear underneath his raised foot.

  “Because you blasted imbecile, he can feel it when it turns on! So, before we go telling him that we’re here and we’re watching, let’s think! This whole operation we’ve been reacting when we should have been thinking. We've been played from the beginning and I hate it! I hate it! It's no fair!”

  October brought back his foot again, but stopped as he realized the large hand of Agent Flores was resting heavily on his shoulder. He turned in anger to see that Miho had returned and was holding forth a pink box of donuts. October lowered his foot, his eyes on the donuts. He hardly noticed the sobs of the bleeding man below him.

  "These were in the break room, Mr. President," Miho said flatly.

  The President grabbed a donut and sat down. He ate the donut, while Flores carried the specialist out of the room.

  "What's it like, if you don't mind my asking, Mr. President?"

  "What's what like? The donut? Jesus, Miho, you've never had a donut?"

  "No, knowing that there's a camera in your head. That the government can see and hear everything you do?"

  "Well, I was in my early twenties when I got mine. I've never known any other life. I would expect it's not much different than your life. You're watched, listened to, your phone calls bugged, your internet searches monitored. It's there I suppose, in the back of your mind, that knowledge that you're not alone. In some ways, it's a little comforting I think. Could you hand me another… the one with sprinkles. They were my idea really."

  "Sprinkles?"

  "The cameras."

  "Really? Why?" she said passing over a donut that disappeared rapidly into his mouth.

  “We scared people. They didn't know exactly what we were. The government kept us top secret, but that only made it worse. There's no way to dispel rumors if you won't admit something exists. Then things got out on occasion and people really didn't want the government to have a tool that killed so quietly, that was so lethal and efficient. People just wanted cold unemotional machines, drones that killed, not people who killed. Humans have a record of cruelty. But… the maple bar please… I knew that we were important. I knew what was coming."

  Flores came back into the room and took up position beside Miho.

  "Did I kill him?" October asked, his mouth full of donut.

  Flores shook his head, no.

  "Good. Anyway, I suggested a compromise: put a camera inside our heads and a panel could review it in cases where there was doubt. A few Supreme Court Justices, a few senators and a few ex-generals formed the panel. Anyone could bring a suspicious case before them and they'd review the tapes of the Alphas and so on and so on. At first the rest of the Alphas resisted, but I convinced them. You see, these men were killers, if they were disbanded, where would they go? I was saving them. I think they saw that. They agreed in the end, but insisted that if something was going in our head, one of our own would do it. So, Jacob did it. He designed it all and performed the surgery. He is a frighteningly smart man. Anyway, after "The Night of a Hundred Bullets" no one even checked the feeds anymore. We were heroes. It was the cameras that kept us around long enough to allow us to be heroes. I allowed that."

  October began another donut.

  "When mine is turned on I don’t feel a thing, but Nestor feels it. The son of a bitch gave Nestor a different camera. Why would he have done that? How would he
have known that Nestor would have been the only one of us left? How could he have known?!”

  “I don’t know, sir. Maybe…” Miho stopped glancing uncertainly at the blood where the computer specialist had been.

  “Maybe what, Miho?"

  "Maybe he gave you the different camera. Maybe all of them could feel it, only you couldn't."

  October grew very still and held tight to the edge of his chair.

  "I mean, sir, you were the go between for the government, you weren't a field…"

  "Shut up, Miho. They liked me. I was… just shut up."

  Miho nodded her head and pulled out her small tablet, her eyes sparkled in the blue glow.

  "What now, sir? We have to do something."

  "If we turn Nestor's camera on, he knows. He knows we’re watching, he knows we’re here. We turn on that camera and Nestor knows where we are,” October said, unsuccessfully attempting to wipe the donut glaze from his fingers onto his pants.

  “So what do want to do, sir?”

  October stared at the screens, black and ominous.

  "I made them heroes, you see? I don't know how they can ignore that. I made them heroes, so why don't they like me? Why aren't they my friends?! Why don't they like me?!" October screamed as he kicked in the glass of the screen that was most clearly showing his reflection.

  Chapter 9

  ***

  “This is a suicide mission, Jacob. How do I get out?”

  Jacob lit up a cigarette while Nestor looked over the maps.

  “Well, when you shoot him, I suggest you run real fast in the other direction," Jacob smiled at Nestor, who didn't move. "I never said the plan was perfect.”

  Nestor pushed away the maps and glared at Jacob while absentmindedly tapping his finger next to the knife that still lay between them.

  “Yeah. Right. Look, Nestor, do I need to tell you… if you feel your camera go on tell me, make sure you don't look at any defining elements as well, okay? And don’t look at Arian over there. He’s got to stay hidden.”

  Nestor nodded and took another drink of whiskey.

  "Sorry, I had to say it. Okay, Nestor, what do you actually know about The Island? The Shot? The Migration?”

  "Never heard of any of it."

  "Right. Wait, really?"

  "I don't watch the news or anything."

  Jacob looked over at Arian whose mouth hung open in shock. Jacob stubbed out his cigarette and tried to wrap his brain around the situation.

  "The entire existence of human kind isn't news, Nestor! This is… it is more than news!"

  Nestor just shrugged.

  "How do you not know about this? Someone must have mentioned The Shot, or The Migration!"

  "I don't talk to people."

  "This is unbelievable."

  "Sometimes an assassin shows up to kill me and we talk before I kill him, but not usually about current events. It's more like, "ow" and "stop" and "please" - that kind of thing."

  Jacob burst into hysterics and took awhile to regain himself. When he finally did, he rested his head on the palm of his right hand and looked sideways at his oldest friend's unmoving expression.

  “Jesus, Nestor. Okay, where to start? Do you mind if I multi-task a bit here?"

  Nestor shrugged. Jacob reached over to a gym bag by his side. He pulled out a detonator and a trigger - both bright pink with the image of a smiling cat painted on them. He began the process of programming the two electronic devices as he spoke.

  "Well, for decades, the big companies have been genetically modifying our food under the claim that: it helped feed the masses by preventing diseases from wiping out crops. You know, they'd change the genetics of corn so that it wouldn't smell good to locusts or something. Well, a long while back, before we were born, while they were doing that, they decided to add infertility into the genes so that the plants wouldn’t make their own seeds. Up until then, you grow a tomato, the plant makes its own seeds, and you get tomatoes the next year too. No more. Everyone has to buy a shit load of seeds every year, the companies make more money. And the cherry on top, these crops are super predatory. You throw these seeds in the air, they blow over to your neighbor's organic field and they take over in a year and now guess who has to buy more seeds? You with me?"

  Jacob held up the detonator and pushed down the button of the trigger with his other hand. A small green light blinked on the detonator. Jacob smiled with satisfaction as Nestor poured himself another drink with a nod.

  "Okay, now a little side effect, it turns out, is that the genetic modifications effected human genes over the generations, so that, eventually, it made every man whose mom ate the stuff while she was pregnant, sterile too. In our generation it was varied, a few of us, like me, were just, limited. We could have one kid maybe, then we were dried up. Anyone even a little younger - no chance, no kids. The men born before us, aka old guys, are the only men capable of breeding anymore. The problem on top of that, was that, due to the effective spread of these crops, there wouldn’t be enough to feed new moms (if young women were even willing to sleep with the old guys) without making their kids infertile. I mean, there were like a few fields left with untainted crops, all on islands that were too far off the coast for the tainted seeds to have blown over during crop dusting. Mankind was on the brink of extinction it looked like.”

  “More whiskey?”

  Jacob nodded as he reached in the gym bag and lifted out very large brick of plastic explosives and set it on the table. He took a sip of his whiskey and then lit another cigarette while checking the explosives.

  "You think you should smoke over a brick of explosives big enough to blow us all up, Jacob?"

  "You mean because of lung cancer? What's life without a little risk?" Jacob laughed. "Okay, now, the good news - a bit over a year ago the government found a cure. A shot. The Shot. A shot that was to be given to all these sterile young men. A year after injection they’d be potent. The side effect was that they’d get sick for a few months after The Shot, nothing serious. It's like flu for everyone who had The Shot. Unfortunately, if you hadn't had The Shot, this flu seemed to kill you."

  Satisfied with the brick of explosives, Jacob began the delicate process of attaching the detonator to the brick.

  "Tricky, tricky," Jacob sighed. "Anyway, they build a big city state in the Pacific off Los Angeles, super fast, a manmade utopia built from the foundation of the Channel Islands down to Catalina. The richest twenty families in the world basically paid for the thing. They call them - The Founders. They took the few untainted crops that weren't already there and planted them there. And then they announced the plan: for a year the potent will maintain these crops and live on The Island, away from the rest of society. All the young women and all the old men are Island-bound. For security reasons, the military won't be inoculated until later, so that they can protect the Islanders."

  "From what?"

  "A good question," Jacob laughed, "that no one asked. Everyone was just too happy to be saved. Even older women got The Shot, just so the flu doesn't kill them, not because they need to breed. There's only so much room on The Island, it's only for the potent, right? And so, the rest of us will stay on the mainland until the antidote fixes us."

  “That's good.”

  “Yes."

  "What's the problem, Jacob? Mad it wasn't you who saved mankind?"

  Jacob clicked a few buttons on the detonator and the green light blinked again. Jacob smiled and put the newly made bomb into the gym bag and the trigger into his breast pocket.

  "The problem, Nestor, is that it's not true.”

  "Which part?"

  “The part where we don't all die.”

  "Oh."

  "Now, we have to wait. I don't want to say the next part twice."

  Jacob lit up a cigarette. Nestor followed suit.

  Arian snuck an occasional glance at the two men, both legends of his youth, both seemingly untouched by the years that had passed, as if they were simply too hard
even for time to hurt them. He watched as the two men waited, drinking and smoking like there wasn’t a bomb next to them and a plan for the President's assassination on the table.

  Chapter 10

  ***

  Miho couldn't take it anymore. The President had now spent five minutes staring at the remaining screens mumbling about people liking him. By grabbing the donut box she was able to draw his attention.

  “Sir, if we’re not going to turn on the cameras, we should go. The Migration is in full effect and needs oversight.”

  Eyes still on the empty donut box, October nodded his consent and forced his large, tired frame up to standing, saying, “There’s nothing they can do, really. It’s just like a game. A beaten man moving his king across a chessboard, no hope or chance, not willing to quit."

  “Yes, sir, I agree, we should just forget about Nestor and Jacob.”

  “Except...” October turned and stared at the now dormant screens.

  “Except what, Mr. President?”

  “Except, I checkmated both these men years ago, so why are they still moving around?!”

  October screamed in rage and threw his chair at the far wall. Somewhere in the back of his mind he registered that Flores was now between him and Miho, though she hadn't even flinched.

  “Big picture, sir, the only king on the board is you.”

  October thought about this.

  “Go get the specialist and have him turn on the screens. I want to see where they are and then I'm going to kill them,” he said with a chilling calm.

  "Sir, don't you think…"

  "Now, Miho!"

  “Yes, sir.”

  She turned and left the room. October looked at Flores who stared back impassively. October moved close so that his accusatory hiss would be heard.

  "You betrayed your kind. We celebrate that, Agent Flores. Agent Alberto Flores, the one Indian from Jacob's Shadow Army that went turncoat. Oh, yes, I remember when Miho told me about how she had a man on the inside. My excitement, yes, I remember it well. She gave me you and you gave us the tools to kill Jacob."