Eupocalypse Box Set

by Peri Dwyer Worrell

  He got out of his car and walked the remaining four miles to his office. On foot, he noticed things he hadn’t seen driving: the squishy texture of the asphalt, the way the painted road markings were dissolving into a reticulated pattern of cracks, the way plastic bottles were dissolving into the roadway itself, the pieces of wire left uninsulated, and metal belts left behind where treads had melted off the broken chunks of truck tires. Once he got into the downtown area, he saw that power was out. Some homes and yards had flooded: water-main covers lay open in front yards, and random roof tiles had melted, the plywood sheeting warped and separating underneath it.

  He reached his office, a venerable stone building on the old town square near the courthouse, and found a small crowd standing around out front—all men. There were about twenty-five of them just standing around aimlessly.

  He smoothed his plaid cotton shirt and hitched the waist of his jeans before approaching with shoulders squared. Quite a few of the men were known to him: Baxter Levine, the Lieutenant Governor of the local Kiwanis division; Joe Davis, whose wife Jennifer was head of the PTA umbrella group; Raphael Rainey of the Arkansas Sons of Confederate Veterans; and Juan Lopez, the head of Voz de Arkansas.

  Tyrell clicked into his greeting routine, glad-handing and back-patting like the consummate pro he was. Like any politician, he had a natural-born, finely tuned baroreceptor in his right hand which, correlated with eye contact and tone of voice, reliably told him how affiliated a given person was with him.

  This innate receptor array was sending alarm bells to his brain as he moved through the group. He noticed the men bunching a little closer behind him as he approached the door. The office was locked up, there was no sign of his three staffers, and he pulled the key out of his pocket. The colored plastic tab on the key was sticky, but the key still worked.

  He put it in the lock and turned it, and as the door opened, a firm bump from his left surprised him. Baxter had bumped him, and as he turned his head that way, Juan was on his right and stepped forward, almost knocking him down. The whole crowd forced him into the office, his keys still hanging in the door lock.

  “Where’ve you been?” demanded Baxter. “With all this going on?”

  “And what’s up with the protectee program? Why weren’t you working with us to notify us ahead of time?” Juan demanded.

  Another man, a sun-broiled farmer in a red baseball cap, said, “Where’s my family?”

  Tyrell put his hands up placatingly. His mouth went dry and his heart pounded as he faced the array of angry faces before him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “I just got here myself. If you could just give me a minute.”

  Tyrell turned right to look at the computer on the desk he was backed up against. The monitor was misshapen, sagging in the center of a puddle which radiated ripples in the shiny lacquer of the wood desktop.

  Something hit him in the left side of the head, causing something to crack in his jaw and a sharp, blinding pain to knife through his skull. He slapped his hand to his neck and right ear, and the flinch and stagger was all the men needed to animate their ferocity. The farmer shoved him with both hands, sending him sprawling over the desktop. When he kicked out, his legs were seized and he was dragged off the desk, his head striking the ground hard.

  Dazed, Tyrell thrashed weakly, but his arms were pulled out and he was borne out through the doors, past the stone pillars of the old historical building, and into the town square.

  “Get him! Kill him!” someone barked. The chorus was picked up and passed around the crowd, and someone produced a length of stout rope.

  That evening, a strange, outmoded drupe hung from the old oak tree in the Rogers town square. Senator Nathan Bedford Tyrell had become the first man lynched in Arkansas in over seventy-five years.

  Girl Scouts

  Hawa was running with the other girls. She was happy for a change. With the sheik in the funny hat talking to the grownups, who kept looking very sad and angry, things had been scary in the village. Mama told Hawa a lot to be quiet and stay away; the discussion was for grownups only.

  This man wasn’t like the other sheik who came from the city and made sure they were going to school. This sheik came from the sea. The women walked down to the sea to get the seafoam for rendering, and there they were, he and his men. Their dinghy was pulled onto the beach above the tideline (ruining enough seafoam to feed a whole family, she heard her aunt say angrily).

  Hawa wasn’t the tallest of the girls. She was only eight, and her cousins were all nine, ten, and eleven. Her mother said she would start to grow fast in a year or two, and then, when she got tall, it would be time to find her a husband.

  Hawa wasn’t sure she wanted a husband. “If I get a husband, will I get sad and quiet and walk in the funny way married ladies walk?” Some of them didn’t walk that way, though, and Hawa wasn’t really sure what the difference was.

  “No, child. Don’t be silly!” Her mother frowned.

  “But when ladies get married, they have to do what their husbands say. Once I’m grown up, I don’t want to do what someone else says!”

  Papa beamed at her and said, “That’s my girl.”

  Mama, on the other hand, scowled and shook her head. “You mustn’t be so wicked, Hawa. You don’t want them to shame you. You want to be a good wife.” Her mother glared daggers at her father, who absently patted Hawa’s soft hair.

  “It is haram,” he murmured quietly. “It is the old way.”

  The man in the funny hat made all the older girls wrap their heads and bodies in cloth. They let the cloth fall back so everyone could see their scars and beads and braids, though. What was the point of being women and having the marks and braids and fine headdresses if they had to hide them? They were used to walking around with nothing on their tops because of the heat. The desert sun baked their skin to a vivid rich, dark color which Hawa liked better than the pasty lighter skin of the man with the funny hat and his men.

  He wasn’t as light as the woman who visited from the city one time, with the man from the health service. She was nice and funny, but with her yellow hair and pale eyes, she looked like a ghost. The Sheik’s men also talked funny among themselves, in a language that sounded like they were coughing up phlegm all the time. She liked the sound of the Awar language better, and it wasn’t just because she didn’t understand the other one.

  The man in the funny hat had called the men to a special council meeting for the men only. This was different, because the Afar tradition was for the men and women to sit on different sides of the gathering, as Allah willed, and discuss things together.

  Papa kissed her on her head and whispered, “Come running to the council hut if anything bad happens.”

  “What would happen bad, Papa?” Asked Hawa.

  “You will know if it happens.” Papa straightened. Mama had entered their house silently and stood looking accusingly at Papa. Papa pretended not to notice, and stiffly walked out.

  No sooner was Papa gone than Mama took Hawa by the hand. She pulled her roughly down the path to the house of Auntie Mayala. Auntie Mayala was a big, big, fat woman. Her house was twice as big as Hawa’s family’s house, even though Mayala lived by herself.

  Today, there were many women squatting in the dust outside Mayala’s house. Mayala herself was nowhere to be seen. All the girls Hawa’s age and older were there with their mothers. The older girls were standing separately, whispering and glancing around nervously. Hawa trotted over to the group of eight-, nine-, and ten-year-olds, and they were soon engrossed in a game of jumping and counting.

  Her cousin Koyna was soon to be married, and she had filed her teeth to points. Her cheek scars were in a row like rays of sunshine coming from her beautiful eyes, and Hawa loved her flashing smile. Koyna often sneaked Hawa a piece of cut fruit when she was helping with the cooking. Now Koyna looked uncertainly at her mother. She held the hand of her best friend for a moment and then slipped into the entry of Mayala’s s
helter, where one of the women was beckoning her from behind the colorful cloth door. Koyna went inside.

  It was Hawa’s turn to jump and count, so she got in the middle of the circle of girls. Their song rose with laughter and made Hawa happy. She was about to reach the end of the counting song and jump out of the circle so the next girl could have a turn.

  A scream inside the hut silenced them.

  “Koyna!” Hawa recognized her cousin’s voice. Koyna screamed again, and Hawa flew at the door of Mayala’s home. The women squatting nearby blocked her from getting near. She lashed out at them ineffectually. They grabbed her wrists and ankles, but she managed to break free as Koyna let out one more ragged, sobbing shriek of pain.

  Hawa turned around and ran to the clearing, where the men were seated around the sheik with the funny hat. She almost bowled her father over as she vaulted into his arms. “Papa! Papa! It’s Cousin Koyna! They’re hurting her. Oh, Papa!”

  Her father stood up, Hawa clinging to his neck. “I suspected as much! You have tricked us, Sheik Abdullah. It is haram, and you have made the old women bold with your Arab lies!”

  Hawa buried her face in his neck, but not before she saw several men drawing their curved Qolxad daggers from the sheaths at their waists and running in the direction she had come from. Some of the men stayed where they were, but most of them were running towards Mayala’s house.

  Sheik Abdullah pointed his finger at Hawa’s father’s face and shook it. “You should be ashamed that you abandoned your traditions so easily on the say-so of the people who come from the city. Sheik Musa and those like him listen to the ones who would violate our African culture!”

  “You’re no African! What do you know about Danakil tradition? I say it is haram, just as the Musa says. He brings school things and medicine. What do you bring us but hatred and the tradition which puts our women in fear of death? I am taking my daughter home.” With that, her father stalked down the path to their home. He sat on the low bench by the remains of last night’s fire with Hawa in his lap.

  She calmed her tears eventually and climbed off of him, sitting by his side and looking up at his care-worn face. “What were they doing to her, Papa? Will she be alright?”

  Papa sighed. “It is a horrible thing, my child. But it is our tradition.”

  “What, Papa? What is our tradition?”

  Papa took a breath as if to speak, stopped, started again, and paused. He was plainly not sure what to say. He looked very sad as he finally answered her. “Do you know how a he-goat makes a she-goat have a baby goat?”

  “Of course, Papa. I’m not a baby!”

  “Okay. Well, to make sure a girl is pure, the tradition is to sew her…shut so that no one can make her pregnant.”

  “Sew her? With a needle?”

  “Yes, and a strong cord. They cut away everything down there and sew it up nice and smooth.”

  Hawa put her hand between her legs, touching the soft folds of sensitive flesh there. No wonder Koyna was screaming! Hawa remembered how bad it hurt the time she was walking on a big branch of firewood, fell, and scraped herself there when she was little. She couldn’t imagine how bad it would hurt for someone to cut it! Tears welled back up into her eyes.

  “Hawa, the people from the city who started the school, Sheik Musa and the girl Nejat, they taught us that it is not the will of Allah to do this. The Bedouins in the North used to do it, but they have stopped. It makes it dangerous for women to have babies. And it makes it…not nice…for a girl when she is first married. The Arabs across the Red Sea took the tradition from us, and now they do it more than we do. Since there is no more work and no more money in the oil wells in Yemen and Oman, they’re coming across the sea and bringing this custom back with them. It isn’t our custom any more, or it shouldn’t be.

  “But Hawa, the women who had it done to them so that they would be good wives and mothers, the ones who sacrificed so much to bring pride to their families instead of shame—like your mother—they don’t see it that way. They want their daughters to follow the Afar tradition and be like them, and their mothers before them, and their grandmothers before them. They see the girls who don’t go through it as weak and evil. I will not let this happen to you. We will stay right here until it is all over. Don’t worry.”

  The men had reached Mayala’s home, running with their curved daggers in their hands, the scabbards flapping empty at their waists. They burst from the low, dry brush and found the girls clustered in bunches by age.

  The women were just carrying Koyna out, six of them gripping the edges of a mat made of layers of cloth and woven reeds. The girl lay moaning in the center of the folded mat. The women carried her to the shade of the canopy constructed next to the home and gently lowered her to the ground. Her legs were bound together from ankle to hip with wide white strips of bandaging. Her big toes were tied together with the special white string, tied in a special fancy bow. There was a trail of dripped and dried blood on the top of her right foot.

  Yemane pushed his way through the clot of adult women standing near the girl. “What are you doing?” Well-respected and almost forty, Yemane was the biggest man there, with broad shoulders and an imposing presence. “Not even Sunna, but the full job? You know this is haram! Where is the girl’s father?”

  Koyna’s father was nowhere to be seen. Her mother crouched by her daughter’s head with a cool cloth to soothe her, pointedly ignoring Yemane.

  As he approached, Koyna’s mother stood. “I will not have my daughter be a whore!” She spat the words out with fury. “I went through this, and every one of these women did! We see what becomes of girls who’re not closed. Remember when they paraded Zehara through the village as a slut? I will not have that happen to my Koyna. You would have a whole generation of our girls be whores!” She waved her arms to encompass the whole crowd of young females—from teenagers to toddlers—around the clearing. “It has been fourteen years since one of our girls has had the artful touch of Mayala, and the other Afar people are saying in the Dagu that this is where to come for a whore, not a wife! They’re calling us prostitutes, do you understand?”

  “I understand enough, woman!” Yemane said, brandishing his blade. Yet, he hesitated slightly, recalling the young men from the next village who had taken to hanging out in the open country, where the footworn paths of their village faded into the dust.

  The women and men recoiled from Yemane’s blade, fearing bloodshed, but Sheik Abdullah’s voice broke through. “It is not haram. It is halal. It is the right thing to make sure that your women are pure and not wanton.”

  In the silence, several of the teen girls caught one another’s eyes. They seized up toddlers and young girls in their arms and ran off into the bush.

  Hawa clung to her father, but she flinched when the cloth over the low doorway was pushed aside. She gripped her father’s shirt convulsively. She looked up, and there stood two of the older girls.

  “Give her to us. We will take her to Musa,” one of the girls said. Hawa’s father gently pried her fingers away and gave her a push. The two teenagers each grabbed an arm and dragged her outside. Her father changed his mind and started after them, but by the time he got out the door, the three girls were gone, running silently on swift bare feet.

  Shanghaied

  Hen Li stood among the prisoners, silently blinking in the hallway. They were in the trance of near-starvation, swaying gently on bare feet, ragged clothing hanging on their emaciated bodies. It slowly began to penetrate their awareness that their captors had freed them and left, and that the doors were open. They looked out the window at the streets of Beijing: once teeming with life but now all but deserted, all the signage melted or fallen to pieces, autos and bicycles scattered everywhere, like some giant had tossed a handful of cars like dice and walked away. Blackened, blank spots in the urban landscape lay like teeth lost from the city’s once-lovely face.

  Finally, a middle-aged woman pressed the bar on the stairwell door. It open
ed. She stepped onto the darkened landing and faltered, holding the door open while waiting for her sluggish, hungry irises to accommodate to the gloom. A young man came behind her and put his hand on the door, holding it open. She faltered towards the freedom of the steps, her hand held ahead reaching for the railing. She lowered one foot over the first stairstep, glanced back, and descended into the obscurity.

  The rest of the prisoners followed in single file, more or less in silence. An occasional grunt or apology came as someone slipped or stumbled into a thing or person—but really, what was there to say? No one knew anything. Li joined the line and began the long journey down.

  When they emerged onto the street below, they saw other signs of the machine sickness’s devastation: all the vehicles had tires that were flat or absent, and the asphalt streets were now just gravel blackened with the residue of the devouring bacteria. Where wires fed from utility poles into buildings, there were scorch marks from short circuits and small fires where insulation had dissolved. The wires themselves were naked. Pried open by the starving, a row of café-style eateries lay devastated.

  Li sighed. He remembered how proud he had been to walk the streets of this jewel of a city as a boy. He remembered the beggars and gaunt peasants of his youth, and the polo shirts, smartphones, high heels, and bright paper shopping bags of the early twenty-first-century boom.

  The others began to wander off in various directions, free at last and seeking who knew what. Li thought about what he wanted to do. He had mulled things over and over in his mind in the many months he had spent in captivity, and it seemed likeliest to him that the devastation was related to the platform collapse. His interrogators certainly appeared to think so. He had no idea what had become of his wife or children, but his apartment was in between this office building and the bay, so he started towards the docks.