Eupocalypse Box Set

by Peri Dwyer Worrell

  “Hmh. I’ve known Amit since he was a grad student and I was a freshman. I never realized you two were in the same area of biochemistry—”

  “Microbiology.”

  “—microbiology, until just now. How likely is it you’d both wind up at the same place?”

  “You have no idea.” DD gave a deep sigh. Might as well get it over with, since the subject's come up. “There’s something I have to tell you.”

  “What?”

  “I’m the one responsible for the machine sickness. I created it.”

  Akisni gave a little laugh. “Don’t be silly. It came from the big oil corporations.”

  “Which I work for—worked for. I actually built on Amit Viswanathan’s work to create an oil-eating microbe which would grow faster, under a wider range of conditions, than any we’d had before. It was intended for the purpose of cleaning up oil spills in an environmentally-friendly way. It worked better than we could have imagined. Then, it suddenly got out of control; I’m still not sure how. I think my assistant bought some mislabeled cultures. He might have done it deliberately. I just don’t know.

  “But anyway, this is all. My. Fault.”

  It’s strange how saying something out loud makes it more real, DD thought as she suddenly began sobbing into her cupped palms. Even if it’s something you’ve thought inside for a while. She took long, gasping breaths between sobs. Jessica came to her side and put a hand on her back. Something nudged her hand and it was Jeremy, offering a handkerchief.

  “DD, nobody is blaming you,” Akisni said softly. “I’m sure it was an accident.” DD exploded in a new spasm of crying, and there was no other sound in the room for quite a few minutes. Eventually, the spasm of emotion began to burn itself out, and she began to catch her breath.

  “DD,” began Akisni again, “every human action has the potential for unforeseen consequences. If we determine never to cause any harm, we can never cause any good either. And that’s the biggest harm of all. You did what you did because you wanted to help...”

  “...And because I’m good at it,” interjected DD, giving a slight smirk through her tears.

  “You are suffering the results of it just like everyone else in this country, probably on this planet. You can’t carry that. Put it down.”

  Put it down. “Put it down. I should put it down!” All at once, it seemed like DD’s entire body melted. She realized she’d been carrying every blow and kick and lie and insult inflicted on her by Isaac and Coffee-Breath, cherishing it as her just retribution for the destruction she’d wrought. She was overcome by a wave of exhaustion. She leaned back in the armchair and closed her eyes.

  Jessica said, “I remember just bits and pieces about this place. When I saw the rafters, I recognized them… and they brought other things back.”

  “Like what?” Asked Akisni. Jessica described snippets of memory and the older woman expanded on them, or told her what had actually happened, where Jessica’s memories were half-obscured behind the veil of childhood.

  Jessica looked over at her mother. “Is she...asleep?” She asked incredulously.

  Everyone sat awkwardly for a moment. DD solved the conundrum by beginning to snore gently. “It looks that way,” said Akisni. She shook her head. “Odd reaction. I guess she's been through a lot.”

  Jessica piped up brightly, “Hey, are the goats still here?”

  Akisni smiled. “Sure, they are. Wanna go see them?” The two of them and Snowbear began to put on their coats. Jeremy looked at DD, hesitated, shrugged, and joined them. Out they went, as DD spiraled deeper and deeper into intense, serene sleep.

  They visited the barn, where goats, sheep, and cows shared living quarters (the pigs were in a separate building). Jessica giggled and petted them like she was a pigtailed girl again, and everyone’s mood lightened a little. They took a different path back, accompanying Snowbear who said he just wanted to check on something, and when they came out in a clearing, Jessica froze.

  “Oh my God!” She exclaimed. The clearing was the one by the driveway which DD had glimpsed earlier on their way in. The long, deep trench had been finished and was now already half-filled in. LaDwon and Les were wearing light jackets, open in the cool Spring temperatures. They were perspiring with the effort of their labor, but strangely, they had scarves wrapped over their noses and mouths. At the bottom of the unfilled portion, Jessica saw the remains of the winter’s raiders, at the same time she smelled the results of the recent warmer weather.

  “What happened to them?” She was clearly shocked. Akisni turned her head away and looked at the ground.

  “They meant us harm.” Snowbear. “We respect life, but we have to protect what is ours. We couldn’t bury them until the ground thawed. Sorry, I forgot you didn't know. Of course, it's shocking.”

  “So, it was self-defense?” Jessica’s voice was a little shrill, as though willing them to say yes.

  “Unfortunately, yes.” Snowbear clenched the corners of his mouth and looked down unflinchingly at the reeking carrion which had once been human beings.

  Jeremy took the lead to re-enter the path, “Good enough for me!” he called out heartily. “Let’s go!” The others followed.

  Jessica was ten feet away at the edge of the clearing. She clasped her hair behind her head, turned, and vomited, long and hard, into the weeds with all the practiced precision of a recovering alcoholic. Wiping her mouth, she followed Jeremy silently down the trail into the brush. Akisni, head still down, silently took the rear.

  LII.

  It’s Always the Quiet Ones

  Brownie grabbed his jacket, loaded his favorite handgun, a Ruger, and chambered a round. He retrieved his waterproofed leather moccasins from by the door and went out for his shift on patrol. Murphy came in and gave him a quick fist bump as Brownie went out.

  Brownie started down a trail which made up one of their usual patrol patterns. This trail swung to the right around the copse of trees. It intersected a deer trail which led up from the water and fanned out into a fallow cornfield. Instead of continuing along the footpath, Brownie veered onto the deer trail, stopping where it was hidden by the trees. There, he met his connection, a short man with an irritating habit of jingling his keys in his pocket. The other man, the tall one with coffee-stained teeth, was nowhere to be seen. Sometimes, the two men came together, but usually it was one or the other.

  “What do you have for me?” Isaac asked with no preamble.

  “A new microorganism. Something about generating energy, something better than the biogas. Supposedly no risk of explosion.”

  “Still haven’t turned up any EarthFirst! literature? VHMNT?” He pronounced it vehement. “A group called The Justice Department?”

  “No, nothing like that. Um, a book by Robert Hunter about the founding of Greenpeace.”

  “Hmm. Well, bring it next time if you can slip out with it without being noticed. We don’t have access to information networks anymore and we’re trying to get a handle on the motives of these bioterrorists.” Brownie nodded.

  Brownie handed Isaac a slip of paper with the word, shewanella, written on it. Only Brownie had misspelled it as “SHEWENDELA.”

  “What’s this?” Said Isaac. “Some black chick?”

  “No, it’s the name of the bacteria.”

  “Are you sure no one saw you write this down?”

  “Well, there was LaDwon. But he was reading, I don’t think he was paying attention.”

  “How many years have you been undercover?”

  “I—I’m sorry.” Brownie’s face fell. “It wasn’t political information so I thought...”

  “Don’t you get it? The name of the game is bioterrorism, and these are major players. This could be as big as the machine sickness! First, they bring this nation to its knees, then they create a new source of power which only they control, and then they take over!” Isaac may have been a little hard on Brownie here, he realized; he was still angry at himself for leaving DD in the cell when th
ey evacuated, planning to be back within a day or so, expecting to find her hungry, thirsty, and more cooperative. No one could have known it was more than a simple evacuation drill. No one could have known it was a global catastrophe, sweeping through every millimeter of the planet with the wildfire intensity of life itself.

  Realization dawned behind Brownie’s eyes. “I didn’t realize. I thought the machine sickness was an accident.”

  “That may be what Davis wants you to believe. Trust me, there are no accidents. Now, finish your patrol. We will meet again at this location. At oh seven hundred in nineteen days.”

  “Nineteen days.” Brownie did some quick addition. “The twenty-third. Seven a.m. Got it.” He walked back to the main path. As he resumed his patrol, he turned to glance back, and Isaac was gone.

  LIII.

  Best Served Cold

  Tim Schneider reached the end of the row of cotton. His fingers were bleeding and swollen. His back ached and throbbed. He reached into his shirt and extracted a cloth-wrapped bundle and dropped it into the sack at the end of the row along with his load of bolls. He was halfway down the next row before the bag was retrieved. The protectee who picked it up glanced inside and grinned before throwing it over his shoulder and hauling it off. Tim knew that, once behind the truck, he’d extract the special package for further distribution of the substance inside. Just like any prison, and this was a prison, no matter what they called it, this camp had ways of getting contraband inside, and a microeconomy to distribute it according to supply and demand. Sugar, which was what was in the package, was in high demand. It would buy Tim another week of protection from the Tango Blasts. Tim’s natural shrewdness, and his lack of the behavioral constraints observed by lesser mortals, worked to his favor here in the camp. Plus, he’d lots of opportunity for the kind of sexual power games he preferred. Sam had always been too soft for him anyway. He was getting leaner and meaner every day. Literally. Tim tugged the drawstring on his pants, tight as it would go already. Resources were short, they said, but everyone noticed, as the months rolled by, that the administrators weren’t getting leaner like the protectees were.

  The afternoon rains were about to roll in. The Gulf Coast had always had a summer weather pattern of thunderstorms which popped up every day, deluging the area and cultivating grass, mildew, and mosquitos. This summer was the worst in memory; the storms were more intense every day. The ocean itself, to the east, was covered with a constant cloud of rolling fog, which reeked of an organic stench. Every afternoon the fog grew denser, building into a mountain which fused with flat-bottomed thunderheads and surged inland. Tim had heard others say the land he was harvesting had been too dry to grow cotton before, and farmers who’d resorted to the camps said the cotton farms inland, which depended on irrigation, were all fallow since the irrigation equipment had failed.

  The first peals of thunder rolled across the countryside. Tim joined the daily exodus from the fields back to the shelter of the barracks. Before he could merge with the milling crowd, a supervisor clapped him on the shoulder, gesturing towards the peacekeeper at the corner of the field. The man stood holding a rifle, wearing the same cotton pajamas as the inmates, but his were newer and in better repair, as the peacekeepers' always were. The protectees noticed that no matter how much cotton they harvested, their own personal cotton garments weren’t replaced until they were falling to pieces.

  Next to the peacekeeper was one of the Feds, someone familiar. Tim’s eyes narrowed.

  “Another debriefing, Lee?” Tim asked as he came closer.

  “Yes. This one is about your former boss.”

  “They’ve all been about DD, in one way or another.” Tim had managed to gather by inference during these interviews that they’d had DD in custody and lost her. He wondered how she’d managed to get away. He certainly didn’t think she had the guile to talk her way free.

  “Yes, but now we want to get to know more about her personally. My unit leader thinks she may be designing another bioweapon, and we want to know more about how her mind works.”

  Lightning flashed, and the second resounding din of thunder rolled over the horizon, louder this time. Tim silently walked ahead of the two men into the administration building and sat at the wooden table in the wooden chair facing the Fed. Tim smelled cologne on Lee, a drugstore brand. Tim hadn’t had cologne to wear since the morning he was arrested; he missed it. Funny how it was the little things you missed. The peacekeeper stood outside the door.

  Lee started the conversation.

  “How long has Dr. Davis known the Simpsons?”

  “Snowbear and Akisni? I don’t know. She said she used to go to the commune when she was working on some site in Minnesota.”

  “Was she a communist?”

  Tim snorted. “No, she wasn’t really political. If anything, I’d say she was a right-wing gun nut.”

  “Did she use her office e-mail to communicate with them?”

  “Not that I ever saw.”

  “You handled all her travel plans, correct?”

  “Yes. She wouldn’t have known where to go or what to do without me.”

  “Did you ever cover for her when she was visiting Sutokata? Make it look like she was going somewhere else?”

  “No. Honestly, I didn’t even remember about the place until you reminded me.”

  “Don’t use the word ‘honestly’ with me, Tim; I know better.”

  Tim just rolled his eyes. “How many times are you going to ask me the same questions?”

  “How did you ship the cultures to the Chinese?” Repetition.

  “Are we doing this Chinese thing again? Look, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Tim said, for probably the hundredth time. Lee’s bovine gaze slid away from the lie.

  The daily downpour began to pound on the roof. Raindrops streamed down the outside of the windows. The wind hit the building like a wet towel. Rain blanketed the view out the window in uniform grey.

  “Tim, you could go to prison for a long time.”

  “I’m in prison, remember? Oh, sorry. I’m in a protective camp.”

  “These camps are for the citizens’ own protection. There is no law enforcement structure left since the government collapsed. Would you rather be out there?”

  “Would you let me go if I said yes?” Tim retorted.

  “You agreed to remain under our protection when you were protecteed. Obviously, there’d be chaos if we let people come and go from the camps as they pleased.”

  “Unlike everyone else out there, who was stampeded into being protecteed when they were terrified that the world was falling apart before their eyes, I wasn’t protecteed voluntarily, remember?”

  “Which is exactly the point: you know that you could go to prison for a very long time, both for embezzlement, and for selling biotech cultures to the Chinese. Not to mention cocaine possession. Do you want to know what actual prisons are like now?”

  From what Tim had heard, there were few, if any, actual prisons left. Most of the prisons had been secured with systems which relied to some extent on electric devices and electronic recordkeeping. They’d had redundant generators in case of power failure, but no one ever planned for the contingency of the wiring insulation rotting through everywhere, all at once, and shorting out the entire system. The weeks after the machine sickness hit had been catastrophes of brutality and deprivation for the prisoners and their keepers, and the death toll had been horrific. The ones who'd escaped had blended into the general population; the few who survived being trapped inside had been rolled into the camps. Tim had met many in the camps who were former prisoners, and they all told similar nightmare stories. No, he knew prison now was an empty threat. But Tim would allow his captors to think he was still afraid of prison, until it was to his advantage not to.

  “You wouldn’t send me to prison.” He effortlessly put a false note of anxiety in his voice.

  “Maybe not. But how’d you like it if your sugar supply dried up?”
<
br />   This was a new gambit! Tim wanted to know more; he was intrigued. “What do you mean?” He feigned worry. He doubted the authorities had the ability to cut off sugar smuggling, but he wanted to know why they thought he thought they could.

  “Tim, this small-time stuff is too petty for you. How would you like to get a piece of something big?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “DD Davis has teamed up with Amit Viswanathan, the first microbiologist to patent a living creature. We are pretty sure the two of them created the machine sickness in order to cripple our infrastructure. They are cooking up a new organism, which we believe to be Phase 2 of their plan. They, along with their eco-terrorist confederates, are planning to introduce another bacterium. We don’t know what it will do yet, but we think it will make the machine sickness look like a case of sniffles by comparison.”

  “And what does this have to do with me?”

  “You know better than anyone how her mind works. Tim, we want to put you in charge of a squad to compile all the material we’ve been able to find about DD and Viswanathan’s research at Sutokata. We have managed to make contact with an undercover informer the FBI had there for years to monitor their terrorist activity. You should be able to interpret the information we get from that asset; from what you’ve told me, you were basically doing her research for her, just without a degree.”

  Tim at this point sincerely believed that this was true, so he wasn’t lying this time when he nodded his head.

  “I’ll need complete control over the staffing and budgeting process,” Tim said.

  “Subject to my review, of course. You understand.” Lee waved his hands, somehow clearly denoting Tim’s history of embezzlement and fencing stolen goods with that gesture.

  “Oh, of course,” Tim said nonchalantly. Inside, he was rejoicing. This was just too good to be true! After facing off with this man Lee several times over the past months, Tim knew that, not only was he stupid, he didn’t know he was stupid. Hiding transactions from him—on paper ledgers, even! —would be a cakewalk.