Fools' Apocalypse

by Anderson Atlas

  At the foot of his door is a red package and a bottle of Blue Label Johnny Walker scotch. The scotch has a nice black bow tied around it. Ian scoops up the package and slips inside his condo. He relocks the lock and turns his security bar until it clicks. Ian sits the red box and the scotch on the coffee table and stares at it. It’s gotta be a gift from Zilla. Who else? Today was my last install.

  Inside the red box is a tinted red syringe filled with something. Ian’s brain can’t process what he’s seeing, so he opens the scotch, takes a long swig, then flips on the TV. At two hundred dollars a bottle, this stuff is just what he needs to calm his nerves.

  The burn in his throat sends icy shivers throughout his nervous system. His body anticipates the drink before it hits the liver. Ian immediately takes another drink without a breath between. Then comes the heat. He can feel the stress flake off his consciousness like weathered paint peeling in the sunlight.

  The news about the computer virus rages nonstop until two in the morning. Then the TV fuzzes out. The cable news channel finally gets the bug. Ian laughs. Blonds in suits should have been expecting that. He takes two sleeping pills and passes out.

  The next day, Ian wakes with a bad hangover. It’s around eleven in the morning, but still too early to get up. He tries to turn on the lights, but they don’t work. He sluggishly lumbers to the bathroom. The bathroom lights don’t work either. Ian pisses then flushes. The water doesn’t refill. Something is wrong in the building. The sink faucet is dry, too. Damn, what I really need is a hot shower. Ian shuffles to the TV and tries to turn it on. No electricity, dummy.

  Ian’s watch is dead. His brow tightens as confusion slips into panic. He leaps to the nearest window and peers to the street below. There’s a five-car pileup in front of the building. Adrenaline kicks in.

  Ian runs to the closet and tears through boxes until he finds his binoculars, a gift from Dad on his sixteenth birthday. The binoculars are six-hundred-dollar peeps, and unused. He rips open the box and runs back to the window. The street is a mess. People are yelling at each other and hovering around the car wreck. One had crashed head on into the building across the street. Down the way are two guys throwing punches in front of the barbershop. No one tries to stop them.

  Ian heads down to the lobby, taking the stairs two at a time. It’s empty. No bellman and no annoying rich neighbors. Out on the street is a different story. Thousands are running or walking or stumbling up the street like rats fleeing a sinking ship. The cars are jam-packed, and some people are running over the tops. A motorcycle weaves in and out, pushing people out of its way without a word or gesture. There are sirens and horns and yelling. Ian paces in the lobby for a minute, then goes outside. Someone has to be able to give me some news.

  Ian’s attacked by a very sick man.

  Nope, not gonna stay out here. He ducks back inside after almost getting ripped apart. He can’t hear anything over the thumping in his ears. His stomach tightens, as he flies up the stairwell and ducks into his condo.

  Without the TV the house is so quiet. Ian tries to put on his MP3 player, which is operated by batteries, but it doesn’t work either. What the hell? Anxiety builds. He pours a drink of scotch and watches the world from the window. The street continues moving like a river. The mass migration is never-ending except for the bodies left behind. People fight, push past each other, and trample the slow and the weak. It’s total chaos, and no one is in control. The street has bloomed with fear. This is the end reel, with credits about to rise.

  Gunshots echo through the noise, machine guns. A Humvee tears down the road, rams a car wreck, and tries to push past it. It’s swarmed by people. Ian can’t look away.

  A boom shakes the building. It came from the hallway. Shock keeps Ian anchored to the floor.

  Outside the window, Ian sees a body—a woman—falling from above. His heart stops and he drops his drink.

  A jumper, or was she pushed off her balcony? Ian finds her with the binoculars, splattered on the sidewalk like a smashed orange. His veins fill up with a thickness and his thoughts are dull, and he feels anchored to the bottom of a great and heavy sea. He just wants to shut down, hit his power button, and blink out of existence. Did he have something to do with what’s going on outside? Is this Zilla’s next phase? Has Zilla gone too far? Had I?

  Storm clouds part and a jet plunges through. Smoke pours from the cockpit windows and trails behind like a tether to hell. It crashes a few blocks away, behind some apartments. A moment later, the window rattles. A plume of black smoke grows like an expanding balloon and rises to greet the other smoke and ash coalescing in the skyline. At this rate there won’t be a skyline. It will crumble to rubble and dust after the fires have their way. Ian gulps more scotch. What will I do if my building catches fire? I won’t have anywhere to run. His father lives upstate, and he hasn’t spoken with him for years. The only contact with him comes in the form checks that pay for the condo. Is my father worrying about me?

  Ian is alone now, so he has to think about himself. He sits, but his insides spins like a neutron star. If only he could get just a little sleep, a few hours, then he could think. The scotch won’t knock him out. The medicine cabinet has the answer. He takes two sleeping pills and leans over the sink in case he throws them up.

  The pills hit like a kick in the head. Time becomes meaningless. He forgets about the world and has no more inclinations to leave the condo. He dances and makes jokes and go utterly mad for the next four or five hours. Ian ends up face to face with one of his writing awards, clinging to the wall. It’s trapped in a two-hundred-dollar frame hisfather insisted upon. It reads,High Literary Achievement Award from Columbia University. Awarded to Ian Gladstone.The type is printed with shiny metallic foil and has an official-looking insignia and fancy borders. Ian rips it off the wall and stomps on it.

  He tries to sit on his sofa chair but misses the cushion completely and lands on his ass. The room spins, and he laughs. He laughs so hard that his head tightens like it’s in a vise. His eyes tear. The world is so funny. It has played a joke on him, and he just got the punch line. It has been too long since Ian laughed like that. For years he’d taken everything so seriously. He’d acted as if he was the only one who could fix this broken world. Maybe he was broken, confused, stupid. He’s utterly alone.

  Until he’s not.

  The door bursts inward, and five men hustle into the living room. They have a police battering ram, bulletproof vests, pistols, and batons, but they aren’t officers. They’re thieves. Ian sways and gapes at their intrusion, as frozen as a bronze statue. The guy with the wife-beater shirt under his vest and intricate tribal tattoos covering ninety percent of his body comes at him. Ian should be able to raise his hands, to defend himself or his home, but he can’t. He’s too fucked up. The baton clocks Ian across the head and he falls into an abyss of dark swirling pain. It feels like he’s twisting and sinking.

  One guy says, “No food.”

  Another snaps, “We’re not here for munchies, fool!”

  The closet door bangs open, and someone rifles through the desk.

  The pounding in Ian’s head increases. Warm blood drips down his forehead. Ian needs an ambulance. Shit. The spinning doesn’t stop. He wants to pull out his phone and call the cops. Ha! The cops. He’s railed against the police state in blogs and articles and never thought he’d need them. Now, here he is wishing they would save his life.

  Ian cracks his eyes open and watches the guys move to the door. They’ve got armfuls of expensive clothes, suits, his computer, back-up hard drive, his guitar, and a box of jewelry his mother left behind. It’s everything of value Ian has in the world. Someone should tell them the computer stuff is as valuable as a burnt piece of toast. Well, it doesn’t take a genius to be an asshole.

  The guy in the tank top comes back to Ian, slips off his watch, which is quite expensive, and brings down the baton on on his head again.

  #

  Ian’s eyes crack open. Light infil
trates his bruised brain as the early morning sun squeezes through the gaps in the blinds, barely pushing back the dark. His once tidy apartment is completely trashed and anything of value is gone. Ian is naked now because he has nothing left in this world. He used to rail consumerism, but now he just wants his stuff back, all of it.

  His throbbing head forces him to get up and go to the mirror. He’s a blurry reflection, and he feels exactly how he looks. He’s too thin, covered in blood, and shaking. Ian uses a water bottle to clean off the blood and take a handful of ibuprofen.

  Not a sound enters his ears—no cars, no screaming or crying, no computer fan or air-conditioning unit—nothing.

  His head spins, and he ends up on the floor with his head between his knees. When the spinning stops, he moves to the window and whips open the blinds so that light penetrates every nook and cranny of the condo because he doesn’t want to be in darkness anymore.

  The New York skyline is still, cold, and silent like the model on his dad’s development table. The beginning of the new day, a dark day, is here. Without electricity the buildings look dingy and old. However, the stillness is far from tranquil. There is sadness in the air, tears on the wind, screams silently stuck in the throats of millions. The sky is a swarm of dark-gray clouds. There are no birds flying, no cars honking or dogs barking.

  Even though Ian doesn’t quite know how everything went bad, he knows instinctively that things are worse than he’d ever thought possible.

  Ian forces himself to go downstairs. He takes the steps slowly and emerges to the street like Rip Van Winkle.

  Car piles still clog the street, and there’s that Humvee. The windows are shattered. The soldiers’ bodies are splayed on the street, beaten and trampled. Ian walks to the corner of 96th where a broken water main floods the street.

  Suddenly, the door to a building across the street bursts open. A redheaded woman wearing a pink robe runs toward him. She’s sneezing up so much mucus she can’t speak. She collides with Ian. Her eyes are bloodshot, and her skin looks pale blue. The woman holds on to his arms. Her grip tightens as she slumps to the sidewalk and tries to pull him with her. Bubbles form on her lips as she tries to speak. Her eyes cloud over, and she dies in his arms. She was waiting for someone, anyone, to hold on to.

  Ian feels dizzy. At first he thinks that seeing her die is making him feel ill, then he coughs. Blood splatters in his palm. He’s sick! Ian switches into full flight mode and runs to his building remembering the red syringe Zilla had given him. He flies up all twelve flights. Adrenaline smashes through his nervous system. Ian whips the door open. The red box is not on the coffee table.

  The men. Did they grab it? Ian scrambles around like a drug addict searching for a fix. The box is sitting by the wall, having been kicked around and ignored. Ian opens it and takes out the syringe, hands shaking. Underneath is a drawing of an arm with a dot. Below the drawing says:

  Just so you know your true contribution: all those cameras and listening devices you set up at the police stations, the National Guard, the defense contractors, and the satellite control facility were filled with a deadly virus. They released the virus in an aerosol micro-spray. The virus is unstoppable and so is our progress. In the syringe is a vaccine. We believe in rewarding our soldiers. Thank you for your service.

  ~Zilla

  Without waiting another moment, Ian plunges the needle into his shoulder.

  His head hangs and he feels tears build in his eyes, but there are no tears left.

  A deep thud shakes the building. Out the window a Bradley fighting vehicle rolls over cars, smashing them into flat piles of junk. The tank hits the sidewalk. Its tracks kick up debris, smash concrete curbs. It’s alone with no support troops anywhere. A man emerges from the hatch. His hair is long, and he’s smoking a fat cigar.

  With dizzy realization, Ian turns to face the empty condo. The walls seem to shrink, push in on him. What do I do?

  At that instant Ian can hear Zilla’s voice spitting out those conspiracy theories. He is a liar, the greatest of liars. Zilla deserves to die, to be infected and bloated. Ian wishes he’d seen his face that day in the bathroom so he could hunt him down. But that would be a fool’s errand. Zilla will go unpunished. Ian folds his arms tight across his chest. They might come after me. I need to get out of the city and get far, far away.

  Chapter 1.3

  Josh Conner:

  Bread Crumbs

  Finding things of humor, disgust, and pointless dribble on the Internet is easy, but uncovering something of true conspiracy, now that takes either strict tenacity or dumb luck. For Josh it was the latter. Eight months ago, he was browsing a germaphobe site, reading posts from known biologists when he found some truly insane comments made by a supposed professor working at Columbia University.

  WashTwice34

  “I will never again walk down a crowded mall or airport. People are always coughing. Viruses fill the air! The thought makes my skin crawl. We need to educate people about the true dangers of viruses. They kill and cause cancer and death!”

  Nancy89NY

  “Maybe u shouldn’t even open your window, or leave ur house for that matter.”

  WashTwice34

  “Don’t be rude.”

  Nancy89NY

  “U know; it just sucks how extreme fearmongers like u want to scare everyone into hiding holes. U make me sick. Ur just weak.”

  ProfessorTooGood01

  “WashTwice34 has a good reason to be afraid. I worked on a project last year where we were able to add a protein to the cellular wall of a mild strain of influenza. It could live five days longer, fly farther in the air, and resist certain antibacterial soaps.”

  WashTwice34

  “Why on God’s green planet would you make something like that?”

  ProfessorTooGood01

  “Because we can. It’s the only way to learn how things work. We didn’t really know what the protein would do until we made it.”

  Josh commented himself:

  JoshP8484

  “How did you test the virus? Spray it into the air and track how far it flew?”

  ProfessorTooGood01

  “Yes. We developed a small aerosolizer that would simulate a sneeze. It was a device about the size of a fifty-cent piece. High-speed camera footage was stunning.”

  Josh decided to write an article about him so they emailed back and forth for a couple of days. It was going to be an exciting piece until the professor divulged a secret. That’s when Josh became truly frightened. Someone had stolen the aerosolizer. When Josh offered to report the theft and further investigate but he didn’t hear back. The professor vanished like a slippery cat.

  Josh researched the device and others, but the trail of the theft went cold. Time to move on with his life, though the aersolizer theft stayed in the back of his mind.

  And Josh was busier than ever. He’s a senior writer at Liberty Values, a libertarian think tank. They are back-alley philosophers and out-of-the-box thinkers, and were gaining in popularity due to political unrest. It was his job to fight the icebergs of socialism and ignorance on the web. There were so many lies told by people, comments, and articles written from the perspective of “concerned” citizens and “unbiased” journalists. Yet, under the visible peak of many online personas was a mountain of Marxist philosophy and ignorance about history.

  Every time Josh found a piece about so-called socialist-democracy he posted links to his article about the number of failed socialist countries, some of which were democratically elected. His list was around fifty that he could immediately find, leaving off many countries that were still in decline. In the article, he highlighted the number of failed countries that use free, or close to free market principles to guide production (zero). It was painfully clear that capitalist countries only start to decline when they adopt socialist policies, but do they teach that in school? Hell no. No one likes to be wrong, especially teachers.

  Josh posted links to another article of hi
s that detailed the progress and success of capitalism that often gets ignored. Socialists insist on parading out sob stories that include the people that get left behind. But numbers don’t lie like people do. Those left without jobs or health insurance or who were buried alive by abject poverty is a far lower percentage than the grinding poverty that socialist states create. Even in pseudo-socialist states like France, poverty isn’t eradicated. Their ghettos, banlieues, are simply slums dominated by colossal concrete housing projects, once thought of as worker utopias, that have become concentrations of poverty and social isolation.

  Oh, the hate mail he got and continues to get—three nasty letters just this morning. It’s amazing how socialists always want to silence people, where capitalists don’t. That much makes right and wrong perfectly clear.

  Josh takes his stained mug out of the dishwasher and pours a cup of coffee.

  “Don’t drink it all, or make a new pot,” his mother called out from her room using her shrill I-know-you’re-an-inconsiderate-son voice. She’d moved in with him when her rent-controlled apartment became infested with bedbugs last year and she never went back.

  Josh grumbles and moderates the amount of coffee he pours. It’s early, too early for a night-bug like him, but he has a deadline today.

  The shades are still drawn, and a steady stream of dust parades through the slits of light that make it through the slats. His computer beeps, signaling a new email, and a small spike of dopamine squirts out of his adrenal gland, ordering his feet to rush him to his room.